Forgettable
So, you’ve just pulled off The Greatest Show On
Earth with
the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony…what do you do for an
encore? Well, on the basis of his
vacuous new ‘thriller’ Trance, if you’re knighthood
refusenik Danny Boyle, it appears you may just have gone home
and masturbated furiously in front of Inception and Eternal
Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.
Fine art auctioneer and degenerate gambler Simon (James
McAvoy) owes a lot of money to some very dodgy
geezers. Deep in the hole, he
teams up with the ruthless criminal gang led by goatish Gallic gangster Franck
(Vincent Cassel) to rob his own auction house of a Goya
painting worth millions of dollars.
But the heist doesn’t quite go according to plan and, one bump on the
noggin later, Simon wakes up with amnesia and no clue where he hid the painting.
When threats and physical coercion don’t aid Simon’s
powers of recall, Franck sends him to possibly the world’s least professional
hypnotherapist Dr Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) in an
attempt to jog his memory.
However, as Elizabeth explores the darkest recesses of Simon’s fractured
subconscious in an attempt to discover the truth, the lines between obsession,
love, desire and reality blur, cross following double-cross, as everyone
betrays everyone else to a pounding middle-aged techno beat and Simon wonders
if he can even trust himself…
A flashy, empty remake of screenwriter Joe Ahearne’s 2001
TV movie, Trance is a thriller about amnesia that induces
just that; 20 minutes after you finish watching it you’ll be hard pressed to
remember a damn thing about it. In
the days that follow you may experience mild flashbacks. Stay away from petting zoos as the
sight of a billy goat may cause Vincent Cassel’s face to swim unbidden to the
surface of your subconscious. The
buzz of an electric razor may force a Pavlovian exclamation of “Pubes!” This is nothing to worry about. Give it a week. You will forget.
With its gang of criminals trying to break into their
victim’s mind, Trance desperately wants to be Danny Boyle’s Inception but
has none of that film’s intelligence, precision or style. With its themes of obsession and the
elusive, unreliability of memory, Trance would
also quite like to be Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind but
lacks that film’s quirkily goofy melancholy. Instead, what it resembles most, is Wolfgang Petersen’s
hysterically overwrought, 1991 psychosexual thriller Shattered in
which befuddled amnesiac Tom Berenger
wanders through the film looking constipated and trying to remember who the hell
he is and what the hell he’s done while Greta Scacchi
breathily rubs herself against the furniture like an unspayed cat.
While the heist itself, with its Trainspotting-lite
narration by McAvoy, is thrilling and intricate, and McAvoy is charismatic and likeable
as Simon, Cassel (standing in for Michael ‘Tripod’ Fassbender who
had the brains or good fortune to jump ship before filming) is laughably
miscast as Franck, lacking the suavity, the icy intelligence and the sex appeal
the role needs while the best you can say of Rosario Dawson’s performance is
she’s exactly the sort of unconventional, rule-bending hypnotherapist you’d
expect would include shaving her hoo-hoo as part of her client’s therapy. The film also has a worryingly cavalier
attitude towards its minor characters with one suddenly turning a bit rapey FOR
ABSOLUTELY NO LOGICAL REASON and poor Tuppence Middleton again
finding herself ill-used. The
increasingly frantic plot lacks plausibility and as none of the main characters
are particularly likeable, the film is devoid of tension, the well-telegraphed
series of unsurprising twists that cap the film rendering Trance a
loud, migraine-inducing slice of smug tedium.
Callous, amoral and tired, Trance is
entirely forgettable.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genres:
Crime, Drama, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 41 minutes
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Wednesday 27th March 2013
Rating:
2/5
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